Check out - ART WORK: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics

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ART WORK: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics is a very cool project developed by the Chicago-based organization Temporary Services. It's not super-closely related to this class (maybe more for Social Theory?), but I'm totally intrigued.

Here's their About Us description: Art Work is a newspaper and accompanying website that consists of writings and images from artists, activists, writers, critics, and others on the topic of working within depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property.

I'm really interested about what other people (non artist types) think about the work of making art and if they consider it a job, or work, or what (neither?). I did a performance piece last year in Dialectical Practices based on a survey I created about this. Surprisingly, more people responded yes to artmaking being a job than to it being work. I find that totally fascinating (would have predicted the opposite).

Now with the economy going to pot, that throws things into an even harsher light. I look forward to reading through this newspaper/website in detail.

Mindmaps and more

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If you're not familiar with mindmapping applications, check this one out at MindMeister. If you have John Ploof for thesis next semester, you may see that he's a big fan of mindmapping (though he tends to do his with post-it notes). It's a great process for plotting out ideas and brainstorming, particularly at the beginning of a research process like a thesis! :)

This particular mindmap has an extra Cyberped bonus because it's a mindmap of online collaboration tools (and appears to be quite comprehensive!). Check it out for some other great categories of collaborative resources (file sharing, wikis, social networks, video conferencing, event scheduling, etc...).

Mobile Learning in Education

I thought some of you might be interested in this paper (or e-book I guess?) about using mobile technologies to develop new ways of teaching and learning. It reminded me of some of the early ideas the MAS group was throwing around about using cell phones as part of a group art project. At the end, it also lists some other related works (ipods , camera phones, digital storytelling, etc.). Anyways, this might be a useful thesis resource for someone next semester...

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